Kate O’Neill on Wired Tweeted, “Me 10 years ago: probably would have played along with the profile picture aging meme going around on Facebook and Instagram. Me now: ponders how all this data could be mined to train facial recognition”. Tweet gained notice.

Counterpoint – People already have access to your face from profile pictures (aren’t private and time stamped).

Point – If you were doing a study, you could mine the information looking for timestamps (not always taken near the date posted, sometimes profile pictures are not even human) or you could just ask people to do it for you.

“Thanks to this meme there’s now a very large dataset of carefully curated photos of people from roughly 10 years ago and now”.

Facebook denies being behind the 10 year challenge. It is, “a user-generated meme that went viral on its own”.

The big question, How has our data been used?

Cambridge Analytica – 70 m facebook users.

Facial recognition (Apple & some Android “will be more”). How can it be used?

“China will respond to US actions” (if the US files extradition papers)..

Canadians are not impressed. Highest rated comments from Canadian readers on CBCs new articles.

I wanted to give Huawei the benefit of the doubt that they are not beholden to the Chinese government, but along comes China threatening repercussions if Ottawa bans Huawei. China just made clear its relation with Huawei. Time to look for another company to deliver 5G.

Just a few days ago the Chinese were telling Canada to mind their own business and not tell them how to run their country and now they are threatening us to use Huawei or else? Wow, just wow.

Given all that’s happened over the last few months, the probability that I will ever buy anything with a Huawei sticker on it is exactly 0.0.

After big names like Whatsapp, Snapchat, and Facebook, VPNs are the most searched-for applications in the world. “VPN” is the second-highest non-branded search term behind “games”, and free apps completely dominate the search results.

The most popular applications have amassed hundreds of millions of installs between them worldwide, yet there seems to be very little attention paid to the companies behind them, and very little scrutiny done on behalf of the marketplaces hosting them.

We investigated the top free VPN apps in the App Store and Google Play Store. We found that very few of these hugely popular apps do anywhere near enough to deserve the trust of those looking to protect their privacy online. We recorded the top 20 free apps in the search results for “VPN” in the App and Play Store for UK and US locales. In total, these applications have been downloaded 80 million times from Google and 4 million times each month from Apple. Our investigation discovered that over half of the top free VPN apps either have Chinese ownership or are actually based in China,

which has aggressively clamped down on VPN services in recent years and maintains an iron grip on the internet within its borders.

Furthermore, we found the majority of these apps have insufficient formal privacy protections and non-existent user support.

China may be slowing iPhone sales worldwide, but Chinese people are driving Apple’s App Store business.

China accounted for nearly 50 percent of all app downloads in 2018, pushing the global downloads count to reach a record 194 billion, according to research firm App Annie. China, which is the world’s largest smartphone market, also accounted for nearly 40 percent of worldwide consumer spend in apps in 2018, App Annie said in its yearly “State of Mobile” report.

(Note: Google Play Store is not available in China.) Global consumer spend in apps reached $101 billion last year, up 75 percent since 2016. And 74 percent of all money spent on apps last year came from games. The battle between Silicon Valley companies and Chinese tech giants generated more than half of total consumer spend in the top 300 parent companies in 2018, the report said.

The top company for global consumer spend was China’s Tencent, which owns stake in several startups, companies, and games — including last year’s sleeper hits PUBG and Fortnite.